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CSO miscalculates jobs figures

UNEMPLOYMENT figures for the west of Ireland have dropped sharply after the Central Statistics Office (CSO) admitted last week that it had got its numbers wrong.

The CSO miscalculated by 22,000 people the size of the the labour force in Galway, Mayo and Roscommon. It has discovered that the additional bodies belong in the southeast of the country. The three western counties had been marked an unemployment blackspot, with 5.2% of their labour force out of work.

The revised figures paint a rosier picture: unemployment there runs at only 3.7%, the second-lowest rate in the country. The unemployment rate in the southeast, by contrast, has now officially surged to 5.3% — well ahead of the national average of 4.4%.

At 5.4%, only the border area is similarly blighted. The mid-west has the lowest unemployment rate at 3.1%.

Danny McCoy, an ESRI economist, said it was striking that the southeast continued to